x, 277 pages ; 20 cm

"In Blood Rites, renowned social critic Barbara Ehrenreich confronts a subject that has challenged thinkers from Homer to Freud: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Ehrenreich takes us on an original journey from the grasslands of prehistoric Africa to the trenches of Verdun, from the spectacular human sacrifices of precolonial Central America to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war."" "Sifting through the fragile records of prehistory, Ehrenreich discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place - not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species, nor in our Paleolithic hunting tradition, but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. It is in these ancient blood rites that Ehrenreich finds the first form of organized, socially sanctioned violence - and the spiritual antecedent of war." "Moving into historical time, Ehrenreich traces the evolution of war from the sacred undertaking of a privileged warrior caste to the central rite of the mass religion we know today as nationalism and shows the persistence of ancient fears in the most modern rituals and passions of war."--Jacket

Previous edition: New York: Metropolitan; London: Virago, 1997

Includes bibliographical references and index

pt. 1. Predation: The ecstasy of war. Sacred meat. The true mark of the beast. The first blood sacrifice. The rebellion against the beast. When the predator had a woman's face -- pt. 2. War: "A rough male sport". Fearful symmetries. The warrior elite. The sacralization of war. Guns and the democratization of glory. An imagined bestiary. Three cases of war worship. The further evolution of war in the twentieth century

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